Most Distant Black Hole X-Ray Blast Discovered

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The most distant black hole X-ray jet ever observed has been
discovered some 12.4 billion light-years from Earth, giving
astronomers a peek at the life of giant black holes not long
after the Big Bang.

The enormous stream of radiation, which is believed to stretch
about twice the diameter of the entire Milky Way, is the
byproduct of a quasar — a
galaxy dominated by a supermassive
black hole in its center. Huge black holes like this become
extremely bright when they rapidly suck in matter and then hurl
beams of high-energy particles back into space.

These particles travel at nearly the speed of light and can
interact with cosmic clouds of photons left behind after the Big
Bang. This interaction ratchets up the photons' energy, pushing
it into the X-ray band of light, which results in a bright jet of
radiation, as researchers have observed in an object designated
quasar GB 1428.

"Since the brightness of the jet in X-rays depends, among other
things, on how fast the electrons are moving away from the black
hole, discoveries like the jet in GB 1428 tell us something about
the environment around supermassive black holes and their host
galaxies not that long after the Big Bang," Lukasz Stawarz, of
the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, explained in a NASA
statement.

The faraway jet, spotted with data from NASA's
Chandra X-ray Observatory, appears to observers on Earth as
it was when the universe was about 1.3 billion years old. At that
time, the sea of ambient photons throughout the universe was much
more intense than it is now, which makes this jet brighter and
helps the light emitted from it overcome dimming, the researchers
say. [ Black
Hole Quiz: Test Your Knowledge ]

"We're lucky that the universe gives us this natural amplifier
and lets us detect this object with relatively short exposures.
Otherwise we might miss important physical processes happening at
very large distances from Earth and as far away as GB 1428,"
another astronomer involved in the study, Aneta Siemiginowska, of
the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a
statement.

The researchers note that electrons spiraling around magnetic
field lines in the jet could be an alternative source of X-rays.
But since the blast is so bright, the team says it favors the
explanation that the stream of particles is amplifying the cosmic
background radiation.